


lavender bitters

by blackeyedblonde



Category: True Detective
Genre: Anal Sex, Cunnilingus, Dream Sex, F/M, I Don't Even Know, Light Dirty Talk, M/M, Maggie's POV, Multi, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Threesome - F/M/M, Voyeurism, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 08:19:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11077659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde
Summary: There’s darkness, cut through with a pinch of shadowed blue. Maggie knows she is on the verge of something but feels like the sensation ought to be drawn out, pulled further, pushed to a limit she hasn’t tested before. Dawn just before breaking. Something hums inside that darkness and she hungers for it without knowing its name, though she wants to.She has everything she needs but there is still so much left to explore.





	lavender bitters

**Author's Note:**

> Alrighty, phew. This got a little out of hand! I've had a threesome-ish marble rolling around in my head for like two years and was always deathly afraid to write it until recently, so here we are. This is largely unedited and definitely not beta-read, but I had to throw it out into the abyss before I lost my nerve lol. Consider this fic an experimental endeavor to blow off some steam and ramble myself into a dead-end corner and not much else, folks.

  
  
There’s darkness, cut through with a pinch of shadowed blue. Maggie knows she is on the verge of something but feels like the sensation ought to be drawn out, pulled further, pushed to a limit she hasn’t tested before. Dawn just before breaking. Something hums inside that darkness and she hungers for it without knowing its name, though she wants to.

She has everything she needs but there is still so much left to explore.

Maggie opens her eyes to find her feet carrying her down a carpeted hallway more sparse and narrow than the wooden floors of the Sawyer home. It’s all at once familiar and then not, and the body moving in front of her takes several strides before he turns in profile to look over one shoulder, and then from the cut of his brow and jawline she knows she’s with Marty.

Her nightgown is still on, the same one she’d slipped on before climbing into bed the night before. Her hair is down and her face feels fresh and bare from getting washed in the bath, unpainted and pale without any color on her cheeks. She almost reaches up to cover her chest and then decides against it, enjoying how the thin satin moves against her skin like water.

“Here we are,” Marty says, and opens a white door at the end of the hall. He disappears inside and Maggie snags to a halt at the threshold without following, fingers braced on the inner doorframe while she blinks against new sunlight and curls her toes against carpet.

Somebody stops behind her, only giving themselves away by the gust of warm air that ghosts across her bare shoulder. She turns, unafraid but surprised, and finds Rust looking down at her from beneath his lashes.

“Go ahead,” he says, though he makes no move to nudge or rush her, and at his suggestion she turns to look back inside the room opened up before her.

She knows almost at once that they’re in a bedroom she’s seen but never called her own. The light grey walls, a man’s watch and wallet on the dresser, a loose pile of change dropped into an old dish and a dog-eared book on the far nightstand. The bedding is soft and blue and the air smells the faintest bit of Marty’s favorite cologne mixed with what might be cigarette smoke, though that last note is so faint it may as well be something she imagined.

Maggie wants to ask why here, why the bedroom they share without her—this place she’s never touched or been welcomed into beyond a fleeting glimpse from the doorway of the bathroom across the hall, a passing picture of a life made without her. Here, in this age where they’ve all put any shared past in a locked box behind them.

“Curiosity got the best of you,” Rust says, answering her question without having even been asked. He finally places a hand at the middle of her back, and Maggie takes that as her cue to move further into the bedroom where Marty is already waiting, the two of them crossing the threshold in two short steps. “Not much more to it than that.”

Time and space seems fluid and concrete all at once, and Maggie feels herself move like a drop of mercury across the carpet strewn with sunlight, knows that she’s sliding into a bed that isn’t hers, feels two other bodies join her without the limitations of reality closing them in. The purpose of their surroundings and this moment itself isn’t lost on her, nor does she try to resist it; she feels that humming ache again, building like music, this time unbidden without a drape of darkness covering it. Here, she can see.

“What do you want, Mags?” Marty asks, and Maggie hasn’t heard that nickname softly whistle between the gap in Marty’s teeth in so long—a lifetime, maybe two. They aren’t young anymore but it feels like so much longer than twenty years, and she thinks of what she’s been missing in his absence. The one thing Marty could never be bested at, no matter whose bed she slept in or whose ring was on her finger.

“Your mouth,” she says, certain and steady, though her core is already trembling at the mere thought of it. She’ll already be wet by the time he even gets so far as to look at her cunt, and maybe she already is, but any shame in that yearning is drowned out by a more urgent need. If she cared to look she’d see that the door that led them inside this place is hidden, not erased but simply out of sight.

Marty laughs a little, warm and amused. “I could’ve guessed as much,” he says, and there’s that little glint of shining pride in his eyes. “Ol’ Teddy talks sweet but not _that_ sweet, huh?”

“Don’t call him that,” Maggie says, heatless and more impatient than anything else. She doesn’t deny it though, and that unspoken truth emboldens Marty all the more.

“Lay down and lie back for me,” he says, eyes flickering up to look behind her where Rust is still waiting. Their eyes catch through the light, delay and hold with something hidden from her in a language she doesn’t know. “We’ll take care of you.”

Maggie slides onto the bed and Rust follows, wordlessly gathering her body closer to where he sits, letting her recline between the spread of his knees until her head is cradled there in his hands. He doesn’t touch her bare throat or her breasts, only watches and waits with those sleepy eyes dark under his lashes, one thumb lightly stroking along the edge of her cheekbone. The softness of it surprises her, and she thinks such a small gesture would be lost at the hands of another man. Coming from Rust, though, it feels like something she’s won.

“Breathe,” is all he says, and she does, suddenly more aware of the cotton sheets beneath her and the warmth radiating from his body. Marty is at the other end of the bed, kneeling there while he takes Maggie’s ankle in his hand and gently runs his fingers up the back of her calf until she opens her legs a little wider, exposing herself beneath the rucked hem of her nightgown.

“Do you want me to—?” she starts to ask, and Marty shakes his head, hooking his thumbs up under the satin to push it further up her hips until it’s pooled across the faded caesarian scar that brought them Audrey, breached and backwards into the world. He wastes no time with teasing her, only bows over and lowers himself to the wet heat between her thighs, one broad palm spread over the pale skin below her navel while he tastes.

Maggie hisses and swears all at once but doesn’t dare push him away. Marty’s tongue laps her open and she bites into her bottom lip while Rust does nothing but gaze down and watch, the corner of his mouth barely twitching once Maggie pushes her hands down through the sheets and begins to squirm.

“God—Christ, _Marty_ ,” she says, already wanting more so soon, wanting to feel filled up so much that the ache of emptiness hurts. Marty doesn’t give her the satisfaction of it, though, only using his mouth without the aid of his hands. He swirls his tongue around her clit and she grinds down against his face, heels slip-sliding through the sheets while she tries not to openly beg for his fingers.

“I would wonder sometimes,” Rust says without warning, leaning over her now, close enough that she can feel his breath at her temple. He draws his fingers back through her hair, pushing it away from her face with a tenderness she’s too distracted to really marvel at. “Had dreams before I even knew what it was I wanted, years before I knew who it was.”

Maggie herself wonders if he’s speaking in riddles or nonsense, some great truth that only makes sense within the reflective walls of Rust’s mind, and then pieces together the implications of what he’s saying. Thinks of being bent over a kitchen counter with her panties around her knees, whiskey breath on her neck and getting fucked raw from behind.

“I thought about you,” Maggie says, a keening sort of whisper, half-broken in the middle when Marty’s tongue finally dips inside her body, so easy and damn near perfect. “But I never wanted to hurt—oh, oh, fuck.”

A low laugh rumbles somewhere in Rust’s chest, and his mouth grazes the flush spreading over her cheekbone. “I know you did,” he says, soft, passing over the second part. “But it wasn’t you I was wondering about.”

Fire burns low in Maggie’s belly, flaring up and sending chills rippling across her arms and thighs. Pleasure mixed with a starburst of anger come and gone, something she hasn’t felt in a long time. She wonders if this is what it’s like to get well and truly fucked, Marty working her over on one end while Rust plucks notes like bells and whistles in her mind.

“Does he fuck you good, Rust?” she blurts out, panting, not touching him even though she still lies in the sprawl between his legs. She’s not mad so much as curious, wondering how far down this rabbit hole she can really go if she lets herself fall. “Does he tell you he loves you with his cock up your ass?”

“That and more,” Rust says, sounding sage enough that she knows it’s the truth. He’s holding her face between his hands now, and Maggie has just enough clarity left to feel his wedding band burning against her cheek while she starts shaking apart and bucking up against Marty’s mouth.

Rust’s fingers travel down around her jaw, stroke beneath her chin and then press against her pulse point while his voice stays soft and low in her ear, a steady metronome while Maggie’s thighs tremble and clench around Marty’s head. “Sometimes he asks me to return the favor.”

When Maggie comes back to herself through this span of fluid liquid time, limp and oversensitive and shaking with all her nerve endings held too close to the fire, she feels Marty kiss the inside of her knee before he draws himself up to lay across the covers. He doesn’t reach for her, though, and she doesn’t need him to. Rust moves above and around her and seems to tuck her into one side of the wide bed, laying her head down on the pillow and drawing her nightgown over her hips in some gesture of would-be decorum. His fingers skim along the old stretch marks on her thighs but don’t linger, and a shiver skitters up Maggie’s spine but she won’t ask him for anything more.

The bed seems to stretch on forever in the four walls of this small bedroom, and Maggie wonders how all three of them fit so comfortably. As if it’s a table, stage, platform—an altar, maybe, where she’d given herself up for the taking without even the barest struggle or fight. But it’s not lost on her that there’s still room to fill and spare.

“Show me,” she says, and then decides there’s no sense in leaving room for any question. Two pairs of blue eyes regard her, bright as cornflower and delft. “Whatever it is you do to each other.”

“Never took you for much of a voyeur,” Marty says, slowly while he tips his chin up, and she knows right then that he’s taken her bait for the challenge. “You came wantin’ the full dinner and show, huh.”

Maggie basks where Rust left her, lithe and loose as a cat while the sun warms her back. She smoothes a hand over the curve of one hip and looks Marty in the eye, the line of their gaze unbroken and unmistaken. “I want to watch him fuck you.”  

Neither of them flinch at the suggestion, though Rust finds his voice before Marty.

“Be the guide, then,” he says, bold and sure, laying out the parameters of another test. “Tell us what you want to see.”

They’ve somehow been naked but not stripped bare since the moment they entered this room together, but Maggie wants to see more—she wants to see everything. “Take it off,” she says, only moving her lashes while she sinks further into the pillow and waits. “I want to see all of you.”

They comply without speaking, though she knows they never needed words to talk. Rust reaches out first and Marty meets him halfway, and as their hands move over each other what was unclear before slowly starts to reveal itself piece by piece. Rolling water and shifting sands, until Maggie can finally see.

Their bodies aren’t what she remembers. Older, softer, aged through ten years and then five more since they nearly died in that tangled labyrinth in the woods. Marty’s shape is familiar but lacking the harder edge of youth, still thick in the hips and broad in the shoulders but not as tight in the chest and stomach as he once was. Rust is more mystery and surprise, rawboned and lean, sinewy along his arms but paler and softer along his upper thighs and the small paunch at his belly. They both have scars she’s never really seen or touched, but perhaps mused over and imagined—crude crescents of white and pink, almost shimmering there in the light. Incandescent and unreal as trying to assign humanity to an angel’s face, painted on in a naïve afterthought of wishful thinking.

“Kiss him,” Maggie says to Rust, whose sleepy eyes don’t give anything away. “Get a good taste, Rust—go ahead.”

She idly wonders if she should feel guilty or vile about this, if she should close her eyes tight and pinch the inside of her wrist until it’s blue and purple, but the two men don’t dawdle at her request. Rust takes Marty’s jaw in one hand and leans in without a moment’s hesitation, licking against his mouth before one long-fingered hand moves around to grip his neck and the kiss deepens.

Marty gives himself over to it but matches Rust’s electricity somehow, a sort of grounding current that keeps him steady. Rust bites at his partner’s lip and then runs his tongue along it, savoring even more, and Maggie feels something flutter high and nervy in the inner pit of her stomach.

They pull apart to breathe, Rust vaguely pressing a kiss along Marty’s jaw—something she didn’t ask for, though she doesn’t rebuke him for doing it. “Aren’t you going to ask, Maggie,” he says, eyes glittering now when they brush hers before he dips his head to graze against Marty’s collarbone. “How you taste.”

“Indulge me,” Maggie says, pulling her bare knees up closer to her body, relishing some in the stretch at the small of her back. “Since we’ve got some time to kill.”

“Sweeter than I would’ve thought,” Rust says, still necking with Marty while he speaks. Their lips meet again and Maggie’s eyes are on Rust’s hands, how they seem to cradle the other man with a softness she’s never seen or felt from him. “Nickel thinned with lavender bitters.”

Maggie laughs at that, warmer than she intended. “I wouldn’t believe that line coming from any other man but you,” she says, and then lazes along the edges of her own amusement without much worry. “Touch each other,” she says. “Like you do when I’m not here.”

If there’s a routine forged between them, Maggie can’t find or pinpoint any proof of this being anything but as ardent and hungry as the first time, though these men lack the fumbling clumsiness of strangers. She knows they have done this many times before. They give and take, pass touches back and forth in some kind of dance she can’t follow, build each other up and then pull back down. Both men begin as equals, kneeling opposite each other on their knees, and it winds and unravels from there until Rust has worked his way up between Marty’s legs and started kissing down his neck. His lips brush that gleaming hatchet scar and then move lower, over the plane of his chest and belly until his mouth reaches the inner crease of one thigh. His tongue dips there and Marty swears, fingers curling into the silvering waves at the back of Rust’s head.

“Suck him off,” Maggie says conversationally. “But don’t let him come yet.”

This is the part she hasn’t been able to imagine beyond the vague sureness of knowing it has taken place. Something a world away and apart, like standing in darkness on one end of the earth while knowing the sun rises ten thousand miles away in the same instant. Seventeen years of marriage with Marty and not once did she ever think or know that he’d be living with another man someday, much less sleeping with him. Somehow, the fact that it’s Rust is the least surprising part of all.

There is nothing Maggie’s missed about the sight of a man’s dick, though the little sound Marty makes when Rust takes the head of his cock into his mouth makes her body twinge with something secret and deep. She feels her breath hitch for just a split moment, and that’s just enough for Rust’s eyes to flash up at her while he’s got his lips wrapped around Marty’s cock.

“Don’t look at me,” Maggie says, feeling the muscles in her thighs tighten. “Keep going.”

Marty’s babbling little things that might be holy praise or blasphemy, urging Rust along either way. Maggie watches Rust go down on him and remembers how Marty’s fingers would rake across her scalp, the hot heaviness of him in her mouth, musk and something salty. It wasn’t ever her favorite but he always returned the favor in kind and did it even better, and there was one thing, always the one way to get him to come faster than anything else—

“He always likes a finger or two up his ass,” Maggie tells Rust, like it’s something offhand.

“I’m well aware,” Rust says, backing off to lick a wet stripe from base to tip. Marty curses when his mouth is gone and Rust crawls up to kiss him, the two of them laying there in a dampened sort of disarray. “We’re getting there, now.”

“Telling all my secrets, Mags?” Marty says, little more than a breathless rumble while he watches Rust slick up two fingers with something shiny and wet. “Sad to say, think this one here had you out-figured in about a fortnight.”

“You two,” Maggie starts to say, and then doesn’t finish the rest. Her eyes are back on Rust’s hands, watching as he reaches down between Marty’s thighs until his fingers are secreted from view. They kiss again, slower and sweeter, sealing the bargain with a moan Marty hums against Rust’s mouth.

Maggie stays where she is. It would have been too much to see, and the act in itself is intimate enough—she well and truly feels like an intruder now, or more of one since they’ve graduated to this next part of the course. It seems natural and even more in spite of her presence and she isn’t sure how to proceed with any voiced command. But Rust has been moving on his own accord now for several minutes, moving the both of them along toward what was inevitable whether she asked for it or not.

It occurs to Maggie now that she is only a spectator, a bystander to something separate from her, though Rust speaks to her despite having turned all attention on Marty. “What do you want to see, Maggie?”

“He’s—he can’t be ready,” she stammers after a moment, watching the muscles in Rust’s back move while he goes about stretching Marty open. “Not yet, anyhow.”

“Something slower, then,” Rust says. His fingers must crook to a better spot because Marty’s hips jerk and buck up against him and Maggie feels herself flush as her eyes look elsewhere. The four walls surrounding them aren’t transparent but something thinner than paper, a kind of dreamlike membrane, though she doesn’t know what lies beyond them.

“No real use in sticking around if you ain’t gonna watch,” Rust says, and Maggie makes herself turn to gaze at them again. She sits up in the bed and perches at one far corner, pressing her heels together when she sits cross-legged in the sheets. The sun is still warm against the satin of her nightgown but her shadow doesn’t move or dance along the wall because it isn’t there at all.

“Tell him how you want it, Marty,” Maggie says. Her voice feels loud enough to echo in her own head, dizzying but still level in its tone. “Do you take it on your hands and knees like a whore or do you lay on your back and let Rust do all the work?”

A burst of laughter ignites on the air and that’s Marty, affronted and aflame all at once. “Maybe I ought to ask you the same question,” he rasps, and then turns to press his face up somewhere against Rust’s neck while he breathes through the burn of getting ready.

Maggie thinks that after everything, even all these years later, she never really knew what went down in that parking lot in 2002. She only heard the half-broken stories as they trickled down through the grapevine and even then didn’t want to hear them, already having made her mind up about what needed to end. Marty walked away worse for wear in the end, had to get stitched up at a clinic, and Rust hadn’t fared much better before he fucked off to the end of the earth. She remembers her husband showing up to the attorney’s office with his face still beaten black and blue and leaving the door he came through, with the ink still drying on the paper in front of her, as her former spouse.

It’d been a quick divorce, thankfully. Cut and severed at the root. Marty hadn’t fought her for the house or the girls and she wouldn’t have let him fight for their marriage.

“Put him on his knees,” she says abruptly, more emboldened now from her higher vantage point. “Fuck him from behind.”

They shift around in the covers, a blended mirage of bodies and skin, until Rust has a hand anchored at the small of Marty’s back with a thumb pressing into one of the dimples there. He smoothes his fingers up Marty’s spine and then back down again, soothing him like some trembling beast. It seems to work and Marty’s head drops to hang in front of him, lungs bellowing out with a deeper breath.

Rust keeps himself steady as he takes his cock in hand, and Maggie has felt it, Lord, but never seen it—doesn’t quite see it now, the shape too vague for her to make out for sure. He slicks himself, needlessly in this in-between place wherever they are, and then slowly breaches Marty’s body.

“Shhh,” Rust says, sweat already beading on his brow, still soothing Marty when he tenses and tries to keep breathing through what must be pain. Maggie doesn’t know if she’s blinked or drawn breath herself in the past several minutes, and then realizes she doesn’t need to.  

She isn’t expecting it when Marty pushes himself back to meet Rust at that first shallow thrust, and then they’re flush together in the joining. That thrumming ache is back again, tingling across her breasts and the tops of her thighs, though she resolves to not touch herself.

“Move,” she says. “Fuck him like you mean it, Rust.”

Rust starts slower than she would have wanted, though soon enough there’s the telltale slap of friction between skin and Marty swearing a vivid blue streak under his breath. He’s given himself up to whatever is happening to him, accepted it without any resistance, bent but trying not to break while Rust fucks him long and proper.

Their pace keeps steady until Marty’s face drops into a pillow to muffle the strained whimpers threatening to spill over, louder and wilder the faster Rust goes, and Maggie decides she isn’t ready for this to end until she wants it to.

“Not yet,” she says, sharp enough to make Rust’s hips stutter while he slows enough to fold himself over Marty’s bowed back, crooked and haphazard, his whole body shining with sweat. For a moment they look like a pair of carved warriors caught at a standstill, created at the peak of a fight not yet finished or won. Ugly and beautiful all at once, aged but timeless. Maggie’s never seen anything quite like it.

Her heart batters against her ribs, one hard jump before falling into a softer quietude. Rust’s forehead falls against Marty’s back and their breathing falls in matched time at the contact, making one uniform sound magnified in its singularity.

“Slow down,” Maggie whispers, speaking to both of them now. The next few words rush out before she can really think them through but she wants to see, needs to see it for herself, fearing the truth more than the asking. “Show me how you love him.”

Anything and everything beyond that remains unspoken, and she leaves it to them—whatever it is, whatever they decide to show her. Rust presses an open-mouthed kiss to the curve of Marty’s shoulder and she doesn’t know what comes next until it unfolds before her, the two of them blurring in and around each other until Marty is falling back against the bed, staring up at Rust looking down at him.

Maggie knows firsthand the generosity and tenderness Marty brought into their marriage bed, knows it because she remembers his eyes alight and loving in the better years, how he’d look at her with all the adoration of the world, or so she believed at the time. There’s a glimpse of that same look now between him and Rust, though it’s transformed into something else beyond what she can remember.

When they smile at each other, something bright and unhidden through its gentle shyness, Maggie knows the rest is true.

Rust lets himself be pulled down into Marty’s arms, more against him than on top, until they’re brought together and whole again. The easy grind of his hips is urged along when Marty’s legs come up to cross at the ankle and draw him in closer, and the more primeval art of fucking seems to have taken a backseat to whatever this is. The pursuit of pleasure set aside so that two errant souls can hold onto one another.

They kiss without hurry, each man transfixed by the other, Marty’s hands come up to lace around the back of Rust’s neck while they move. That matching glint of gold sparks in the light and Maggie slowly unfolds her legs from beneath her so she can stand, letting her nightgown waterfall down to above her knees.

The bedroom door has finally returned, set back into the wall where she can see its shape set into the glasslike walls. Perhaps it has been there the whole time. She doesn’t wonder while she moves toward it and touches two fingers to the cool handle, pushing the door out into the open hallway of sunlit morning where time and space swirl down the funnel of what is real.

She opens her eyes.

Any of the darkness found before waking is gone, replaced with the rising brightness of daybreak, a blackness turned to a diluted shade of bayou blueness. Maggie draws in a deep breath where she lies on her side, warm and sated beneath the covers, comforted by the sound of Ted lightly snoring nearby.  

She reaches down beneath the sheet, intrigued more than aroused, and feels the warm dampness between her legs. No shame at the sake reassurance, though she wastes no time on worthless rumination before reaching across the bed to find her husband’s warm body in the half-dark.

They move and merge together until the sun climbs through the window, painting the far wall with Maggie’s darkening shadow. She watches it there, alive and animated while she writhes herself into an ecstasy, fulfilled and unhindered now by what isn’t left to explore.  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I guess this takes place inside the realm of my WWG Verse if you kinda squint, but is definitely not something that's going to continue there as an integral part of the story line. Just weird Maggie feels, me sowing them wild oats, etc.


End file.
